“I thought there were big issues being discussed here, I thought I would learn a thing or two …” and he knocked back another brandy, miffed.
“Oh, so you think … what is it that Maestro calls you — Eustachius? …” (the two of them burst out laughing again) “… that big issues can’t sometimes be handled with laughter?” Don Fernando dropped the question from on high, adding the necessary breezy tone to accentuate his condescension.
“They can,” Melkior swatted at the question as if it were a moth flying across the room, “if it’s a Molière doing it.”
“You wouldn’t settle for a lesser authority then?” The moth was losing altitude.
“It’s the nature of laughter that doesn’t settle — it’s choosy.”
Don Fernando didn’t reply. He tried to catch the editor’s eye, to assert their spiritual bond. But the editor paid no attention. He got up and sat down at his black mahogany desk. This meant, “We’ve had our fun, now back to business.”
“We’ve trimmed your review a bit,” he said to Melkior with a considerate smile. No more than ten lines or so. Had to trim everything today. A lot of small news items.”
“Sorry I was unable to mention personalities …” Melkior was trying to provoke the thing, the “matter of principle.”
The editor flashed a wry smile.
“I wouldn’t expect that from you anyway,” he said with a pleasant look at Melkior. “The fellow yesterday was a different case altogether. He himself regretted that he hadn’t remembered to look around the stalls. That’s why I gave him a piece of my mind. He was all excuses and sweet talk, where you would have stalked out and slammed the door on me.”
Melkior was overjoyed that this was said in front of Don Fernando. He actually mumbled a thank you, which mercifully went unheard.
“Here you are, then,” the editor handed a manuscript to Don Fernando. “Regretfully. All right?” They smiled at each other with an already hammered-out understanding.
Melkior caught up with Don Fernando on the stairs. They descended in silence. Don Fernando was trying to slide the manuscript into his inside pocket, but something was in the way, blocking passage, so much so that Don Fernando’s small eyes flickered a bit in irritation.
“What, it won’t fit in the pocket either?”
“Sorry?” said Don Fernando unpleasantly and rather sharply.
“I said, the article won’t fit. Why did he reject it?”
“What makes you think he did?” Don Fernando had flushed a virginal pink.
“I know he did. Do you expect to keep a secret in a newspaper office? I don’t have it from the editor — there are at least three people upstairs who are delighted.”
“I don’t know the other two,” said Don Fernando, trying to muster a smile.
“But you know one? And that’s me?” Melkior paused for a moment on the stairs. He suddenly felt a kind of painful sadness at the insinuation and asked Don Fernando, looking bemusedly down the stairs, “Why are you so evil-minded?”
“Who, me personally?” Don Fernando had regained ascendancy over Melkior.
“Both you personally and … people in general,” and Melkior gestured hopelessly.
“My dear Eustachius, whatever’s come over you? Ha, why does Maestro call you Eustachius, anyway? The editor told me a couple of first-class stories about him. That’s what we were laughing at. Maestro is a splendid variety of madman.”
“Splendid? I wouldn’t say so. He’s more of an uncorrupted cynic. A Thersites among all the shining heroes up there.”
“So he is, up to a point …” Don Fernando was clearly trying to be nice. “As a matter of fact he ought to live in a tub, ha …”
“With a mind like his, an unwashed bottle would do every bit as well. He guzzles brandy. The tub is for the Dionysian liquid … or Diogenes, if that’s what you meant.”
“Yes, well … sure … But the way he does that job of his! I mean, the way he runs his city desk! The way he pecks passionately like a sparrow among the trash brought in by his garbage collectors (that’s what he calls his reporters), as if he would use all that fecal waste matter, like a crazy alchemist, to distill at least a drop of some ‘genuine’ essence or other, be it somewhat dirty and poisonous — it would nevertheless be the genuine truth about people, a truth more authentic and real than all those majestic and authoritative political, and even so-called cultural, scribblings.”
“He enjoys his mucky alchemy!”
“Well … I wouldn’t rule out the personal experience.”
“But he simply bathes in feces! He identifies with garbage because he’s a piece of garbage himself, and there are no libations there apart from the libation of filth dripping from his …”
“Why the sudden loathing, dear Eustachius — if you’ll allow me to call you that?”
“Why the sudden love? I don’t hate him — I feel pity for him if you must know, because I have a fair idea of where his reveling in stench comes from. But you, you’ll never understand it. You’re too busy tinkering with the model of your proto-Man to be able to perceive the dirty and swinish, semisuccessful and quite unsuccessful versions of him in the phenomenological world. You cannot love Maestro, you can’t even see him. What you said about him isn’t true. Anyway, you were not speaking because of him — you had something else on your mind.”
“Your thought is far-reaching … and dangerous. You reveal … No, seriously now, the editor may have suggested such an affinity to me in the kind of laughter (and here I’m quoting you) Molière uses to deal with big issues. All I wanted to say was that even such a man — while being, as you put it, swinish, and while reveling in stench (which is, among other things, a well-turned phrase indeed) — even such a man has in him an integral, essential something, a nondegradable form that always manifests itself in some way, even as it revels in stench. This is what defines the personality after all. You yourself call him Thersites. So, what makes the parallel doable for you? Were nothing to him but the … fecal bath, how would he rise to the level of Thersites?”
Why’s he saying all this? It’s certainly not about Maestro. But what is it about?
“The editor, for one, thinks very highly of him — in a certain way, of course.”
“He thinks very highly of anyone who can be useful to him.”
“You’re wrong. The editor is useful himself; I daresay he’s very useful.”
Don Fernando stressed the last words with a certainty stemming from a distinct way of looking at things. “You seem to buzz around petty details and get snared by them.”
“What about his refusal to print your stuff in his paper? Do you find that useful, too?” Melkior tried to draw him out through vanity. Don Fernando smiled.
“Refusal to print my stuff? Only this one article … which is truly not suited to his paper. Or any other paper … for the time being.”
Such an air of the clandestine!
“Tell me one thing …”
“You’re sounding like Hamlet,” Don Fernando gave an almost offended smile. “Never mind — I’ll tell you everything I’m able to tell.”
“What did you write about?”
“Oh, that?” Don Fernando reflected for a moment. “About the need for preventive dehumanization … or, shedding tragedy through skepticism.”
Melkior made a stupid face.
“Is this something I could understand?”
“Maybe, if you try. You’re a theater critic, after all.”
“Then help me, for God’s sake!” cried Melkior.